Archive for the ‘Software’ Category

Upgrading my OLPC XO (thinking about it)

Sunday, July 20th, 2008

I haven’t done enough with my XO since I purchased it.  Thought I’d take another look at it, but thought I should upgrade it before I start installing things again.

It’s all still pretty confusing.  All the steps I see seem not-too-complicated.  The problem is I’m not sure if those are the steps I’m supposed to doing.  I think there is firmware, OS and software upgrades but I’m not 100% sure.

I am sure I won’t be doing this upgrade today….

There are “activity packs” too.  I think if I run “update.1″ I lose all the basic activities.  I thing we need need a simple G1G1 update that updates everything to a newer version of what I purchased back in December 2007.

Posted in My XO Laptop, Operating System, Software | No Comments »

Opera on my XO

Wednesday, January 30th, 2008

OperalogoI love the browser on the XO, but I don’t like that it doesn’t have normal bookmarks (or if it does, I’m not sure what I’m doing). It scales everything nicely and does CSS very nicely. But I wanted my CTRL-L to highlight my web address and CTRL-D to bookmark a site. So I caved and followed these very easy instructions to install Opera (looks like a version from Jan. 2007).

Opera is more than a secure web browser, it’s also an RSS and Atom feed reader, bittorrent client, email client, and IRC client. It also has many keyboard shortcuts that make navigating on the XO easy.

It’s not perfect, but it works; it’s got bookmarks (favorites) they way you’d expect it. The downside is it doesn’t scale anything on the 1200×900 pixel screen and things appear really small, the XO browser normally scales to 840×630 and it appears very legible.

Plus they’ve got some tips on configuring the keys for eBook/tablet mode. We’ll see what I end up using for the long run…

Posted in Software, Usability | No Comments »